This is a little outside the realm of what I normally cover here at POP!, but seeing as I haven’t had time to write anything substantial lately, what the hey. Tonight’s episode of Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell (CNN’s HLN network, 7PM EDT) will be a special one, with the entire hour dedicated to animal advocacy issues. Though I have a bit of a heart/yuck relationship with Issues – while I’m happy to see animals granted equal consideration on a mainstream news network, and generally am in agreement with Jane on many topics, the show is also sensational at times, and grants entirely too much attention to celebrity gossip and such – even I have to admit that the idea of an entire hour dedicated to nonhuman concerns, voiced by a vegan at that, is very cool. And waaaay overdue, you might say.

Anyhow. DawnWatch has a rundown of planned topics, as well as contact info for JVM and CNN so that you can submit your feedback. Please tune in if you can, and thank Ms. Velez Mitchell for her coverage of animal rights issues (and CNN HLN for allowing her to speak out on behalf of such marginalized populations) even if you can’t/won’t/don’t watch tonight’s episode. You can also hit up CNN – as well as Issues and its host – on Facebook.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: DawnWatch – news [at] dawnwatch.com
Date: Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:00 PM
Subject: DawnWatch: This Monday on “Issues” — “Jane’s Fight for Animal Rights” CNN’s HLN 7/5/10

The wonderful Jane Velez Mitchell of CNN’s Headline News Network is at it again — but bigger and better than ever before. This coming Monday, July 5, she will do an unprecedented full hour on animal rights issues, which she is calling “Jane’s Fight for Animal Rights.”

She’ll be talking with representatives from many of the major animal protection groups about
– The oil spill and it’s impact on animals
– The Ohio initiative — now tabled, and the resulting farm animal welfare gains and what’s ahead
– Dairy farm cruelty such as cow tail docking
– The fight against a monkey breeding facility planned for Puerto Rico
– The Nevada Wild Horse Round-Up

She’ll also talk with Bob Barker and Pierce Brosnan about whales and Whale Wars and with CSI’s Jorja Fox about the recent release of a group of Bolivian circus lions to a California sanctuary.

Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell airs on the HLN network at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. Jane, a passionate animal advocate, particularly wants great ratings on this one, so please tune in, tell all your friends to watch, and spread the word far and wide. If you TiVo or DVR and watch it within three days the ratings still count. And Jane says those comments matter! So please go to www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?106 either right now to tell her how excited you are about the upcoming animal coverage (which is plugged on the CNN website) or immediately after you watch the show. Your enthusiastic reaction in the past has helped make it possible for Jane to keep doing this kind of coverage, which no other major media person is doing on a regular basis. Keep up the great work!

Yours and the animals’,
Karen Dawn

(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at www.DawnWatch.com. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts only if you do so unedited — leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line.)

Please go to www.ThankingtheMonkey.com to learn about Karen Dawn’s book, “Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way we Treat Animals,” which was chosen last year by the Washington Post as one of the “Best Books of The Year!”

To discontinue DawnWatch alerts go to www.DawnWatch.com/nothanks.php

Caution: Spoilers ahead.

The second-to-last episode of CSI in 2009 featured a particularly animal-friendly plot line. I say “particularly” rather than “surprisingly” because CSI has a longstanding track record of treating animals and animal advocacy issues with a modicum of respect – a practice which stands in sharp contrast to similar crime shows like Law & Order. (See, for example, Veg*nism & Pop Culture: But does Costa Rica have an extradition treaty? and Veg*nism & Pop Culture: Sara Sidle: From CSI to Terra-ist.)

Season 10, Episode 9 (Appendicitement) saw the CSI team investigating not one, but two separate murders, both of which occurred on the premises of a BBQ joint. Since IMDB has a decent writeup of the episode, I’ll let them take it away:

There are two twisty tales in Vegas tonight. Strike that, one in Vegas and one outside.

The first tale concerns lab tech Henry. Greg, Nick, and Hodges literally kidnap Henry on his birthday to take him to this great barbecue place up the road apiece called Harry’s Hog Hideout.* On the way there a crazy lady runs them off the road and the car rolls. Fortunately, none of them is seriously injured but Nick’s car is out of commission. With no cell service, they decide to walk the last little bit to Harry’s but, unfortunately, when they arrive they discover it’s been closed for seven months due to a Hepatitis outbreak. They decide to poke around and see if there’s a working phone inside.

Instead they find a dead body, a man with a raccoon attached to his face.

While Henry, disgruntled about his crummy birthday, hangs with the dead guy Hodges and Greg poke around outside. They figure out that the guy lured the raccoon to a nearby barrel and tried to kill him by filling the barrel with ethylene gas and blowing him up. The explosion threw the raccoon and the guy through the window of Harry’s. So it was an accident.

Meanwhile, Nick looks for a phone and it’s not working. He returns to the scene just as another guy shows up and pulls a gun on Henry. They make it clear that they’re cops and the guy, Slick explains that the dead guy was Gomez the cook at Harry’s, who was generally a good guy.

(Emphasis and asterisks mine, of course.)

Initially – and in breaking with the show’s usual treatment of such cases – the CSI investigators exhibit disappointingly little concern for the dead raccoon. Personally, I am lacking in sympathy for people who inadvertently blow themselves up while trying to lure a sentient being into a trap, only to torch him alive. Killing “nuisance” animals – especially when there are humane, catch-and-release options available – is bad enough; plotting to light them on fire while still alive and fully conscious is downright sadistic. Unfortunately, the CSI team doesn’t voice any of these thoughts – that is, until much later in the show.

Once the plot unfolds and the bodies are transported back to the lab, coroner David Phillips expresses grief at the raccoon’s demise. I can’t recall what exactly was said (nor did I think to save the episode on my DVR so that I might type up a transcript – doh!), but I believe that David muttered something about the human getting what he deserved and referred to the raccoon as an innocent bystander.

In other words, all is well in the Las Vegas crime lab!

Alas, we still have one body to account for…

Just then the crazy broad woman that who ran them off the road comes barreling up and crashes into the debris outside, rendering her car unusable as well.

She comes in, soused, and she and Slick make eyes at each other while eating martini olives. She was Harry’s wife and they explain that Harry ran off, cleaned out their accounts, and they haven’t heard from him since. Nick asks after a phone and Slick says there’s a ham radio out back. They try it but it blows a tube. Super nerd Greg thinks he can make one though.

Meanwhile, Shirley shows Henry a postcard from Harry saying he found a younger woman, took all their money, and ran off to an island to be happy without her. He agrees it’s mean. She then tries to, ew, put the moves on him.

Hodges discovers that Slick and Shirley were making moonshine in the basement. Greg figures out how to make a phone work by wiring up the receiver directly to the phone pole outside and calls for help. As they wait, Henry accidentally spills sulfuric acid on his hand and Nick quickly runs to the BBQ pit in the middle of the restaurant and grabs some charcoal to neutralize it. While rooting around in there he discovers a human skull. He pulls his gun and goes over to Slick and Shirley and asks them if they know who it is, they claim they don’t.

Later at the station they determine the skull and other bones found in the pit are in fact Harry. Nick realizes the ribs are gone. Harry also had hepatitis. They deduce that whoever killed him then served up his ribs at the restaurant. Slick and Shirley each blame the other in their interviews with Brass. But Henry is stuck on the postcard. When they discover that Gomez had a rap sheet for forgery, they figure out that he forged Harry’s handwriting, sent the postcard to his mom in Florida to send back to Shirley. They figure that Harry found out about Gomez’ past and used it against him to keep him at the restaurant and Gomez got sick of it. Henry, who sprained his ankle and burned his hand, decides it wasn’t the worst birthday ever after all.

Sweet serendipity! A man who made his name by trading in the charred remains of enslaved, tortured, murdered and dismembered animals has himself been murdered and dismembered – not to mention, marinated, barbecued, and served up on a platter to his own hungry customers.

Deliciously ironic is one patron’s exclamation of glee: “I have always loved Harry’s ribs!” Clearly, she means to say that she’s always loved the ribs of pigs, which Harry has (with a little help from the omnipresent animal agriculture industry) stolen, repurposed and resold as “his own.” Here, nothing is Harry’s but the marinade recipe. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, this time, the ribs actually are Harry’s. She is literally eating Harry’s ribs. And – being “meat” and all – Harry’s ribs are just as yummy as a pig’s.

BBQ CHEF by chillmost on Flickr

By the by, it’s worth noting that a number of online reviewers recoiled at the thought of – ick! – eating Harry as opposed to the intended pigs. Humans, pigs, cows, dogs: we are all made of the same basic stuff – meat, tissue, bones, etc. If you find the though of cooking and eating Harry (or Spot!) appalling, perhaps it’s time to examine your moral inconsistencies vis-à-vis “meat” consumption. Ditto: dairy and eggs. (I have a t-shirt that reads, “If milk is so natural, go suck on a cow’s teat!” Better still: “If milk is so natural, go suck on your mother’s teat!”)

——————-

* Suicide Food, anyone? Why on earth would pigs choose to seek refuge in the place of their demise? Answer: they wouldn’t. They’re porcine, not stupid.

Very minor spoilers ahead.

I’m a few months late on this – for some inexplicable reason, my DVR “forgot” to record this Very Special episode of CSI, and for an even more inexplicable reason, it took the Mr. and I months to notice – but in the interest of closure, I just have to mention it anyway.

Early on in Season 9 of CSI, vegetarian and animal advocate Jorja Fox left the show; a few weeks after her departure, the writers dropped a subtle hint that her character, Sarah Sidle, had joined up with Paul Watson and his band of sometimes-merry eco-terrorist pirates at the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (if you’re not a regular visitor to Sea Shepherd’s website, you probably would have missed the URL).

Fast-forward a few months, to the Season 9 episode “One to Go” (9×10). Sarah’s on-again, off-again, is-he-her-fiance-or-isn’t-he? love interest, Gil Grissom (William Petersen) is quitting CSI as well. Most of the episode focuses on Grissom’s last case with Las Vegas CSI, and also serves to introduce Gil’s replacement, Dr. Langston (Laurence Fishburne!?).

However, in the last few minutes, we see Grissom

walk the halls smiling to himself as he looks in each room at the lab and sees Brass, Hodges and Wendy, other CSIs, Robbins and Riley, Stokes and Greg. He catches Catherine’s eye in one room and she winks at him. He smiles broadly and turns and walks away. The screen blurs, fades to white and cuts to Grissom wandering a jungle, dressed in a hat and sweaty gear examining a GPS marked Costa Rica. His eyes light on a bug for a moment. He walks into a clearing where a woman, whose back is to the camera, is taking a picture of a monkey in a tree. The woman turns and it’s Sara (Jorja Fox). They take each other in for a moment and then embrace and kiss, passionately.

As Cindy pointed out in the comments to a previous post, Sarah mentioned in an earlier episode that she planned to travel to the Galapagos; and indeed, Sea Shepherd’s activities include an effort to save the Galapagos, so that’s probably where she was (or was heading) when we saw her email Grissom. So why on earth are the two now in Costa Rica, hmmmm?

Though Sea Shepherd says that its “flagship, the R/V Farley Mowat officially began her career in the waters off Costa Rica appropriately immersed in controversy over policing actions against illegal fishing activities,” I can’t seem to find any current campaigns or activities they’re conducting in the area. So I can’t say whether Gil and Sarah are still with Sea Shepherd, or have branched out on their own. Maybe the Sea Shepherd crew took a detour or made a pit stop; or perhaps Sarah and Gil are working with another environmental organization, one based in Costa Rica.

We can only hope it’s as radical, kick-ass and militant as the “terra-ist” sea shephards.

As for CSI’s animal-friendliness post-Fox, we haven’t seen any animal exposes this season, however, there was a case in which a good-sized “pet” turtle ended up with blood spatter and a fingerprint on her shell after a homicide/suicide. While other cop shows might merely treat the hapless animal like any other prop (*cough*Law & Order*cough*), the good folks at the LV Crime Lab express concern for her well-being, going so far as to assure one another that the materials used to lift the print will not harm their only witness to the crime.

It was all very cute, maybe even a little silly, but I so loved them for it. Little victories!

On yesterday’s episode of CSI (“Leave Out All the Rest“), recently departed CSI Sara Sidle sends Gil Grissom a .mov file -slash- Dear John “letter” over the internets. Look closely, and you can briefly see her email address flash across the screen: info@seashepherd.org. ZOMG! Sara is sailing with the crew of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society!

Of her adventure with Captain Paul Watson and his band of anti-whaling pirates, Sara says,

Hello from below the equator, in Puerto Ayora. We’ve been at sea for over a month now. Man, you wouldn’t believe the crew – students, activists, scientists – the dinner conversations alone are mindblowing. And there’s even this marine biologist that reminds me a little bit of you. I wish that we could talk in person but this is the best that I can do. I want to apologize for being out of touch. I’ve been thinking about us a lot, though, all the moments. I thought we could survive anything. This trip has given me a lot of clarity. That last year in Vegas, I could barely breathe, let alone think but now, for the first time in a really long time, I’m happy.

When actress Jorja Fox – the vegetarian and PETA supporter who plays Sara Sidle – left CSI last season, I was afraid it would be the end of CSI’s animal-friendly plotlines. In the past, they’ve dealt with canned hunting involving discarded zoo animals, dog fighting, factory farming and chicken slaughter, and Sara’s vegetarianism, of course. The show has been honored by the HSUS’s Genesis Awards for its compassionate storylines; in a multi-episode plotline, Danny Bonaduce played an aging rock star/animal welfare crusader, who targeted said slaughterhouse in a PETA-like PSA.

Given that Jorja Fox is the high-profile veg*n on CSI’s set, I assumed that she was the driving force behind these stories. I wonder whether she managed to convert any of her co-workers, or if one/some of the writers also just happen to be interested in animal advocacy on their own?

Either way, I think it’s totally awesome that Sara Sidle has defected – from Crime Scene Investigator to international, sea-faring, anti-whaling, activist-pirate-terrorist. Welcome to the dark green side, Sara. Just be careful who you extend your vegan potluck invites to.

Keep up with Sara and the crew through Whale Wars, now airing on Animal Planet (Fridays at 9PM).

Update, 11/22/08: Looks like Daryl Hannah is joining the crew, too!